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My coworker asked me how to raise aloe veras, so I created a planter recipe card, inspired by cooking and First 5 California-style childrearing checklists. I do believe that everyone here has their own recipes which vary person-to-person, just like how my spicy hamburger macaroni recipe differs from my neighbors because they'd substitute ingredients or entire steps.

Worth noting that I included USDA Hardiness Zone as well as AHS Heat Zone. My mother is in San Jose, which is also USDA Zone 9b, same as where I live (near Elk Grove), but we are not the same! Then I learned the concept of AHS Heat Zone, so we're in Heat Zone 8 and San Jose is in Heat Zone 4. This explains a lot why her gardening advice doesn't seem to apply well in our area.

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How can Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans get along after the Vietnam War?

From ChatGPT-3:

The Vietnam War was a complex and difficult period in the history of Vietnam and the United States. It is important to acknowledge the pain and trauma that the war has caused for both Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans. However, there are ways that Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans can work towards building a positive relationship.

One approach is to focus on shared experiences and commonalities. Despite the war, there are many aspects of Vietnamese culture that are still cherished by both Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, such as the food, music, and traditions. By celebrating these shared cultural elements, both groups can build a sense of connection and mutual understanding.

Another approach is to engage in dialogue and education. Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans can engage in conversations about their different perspectives and experiences during and after the war. By listening to each other and learning from each other, they can gain a better understanding of the complexities of the conflict and how it continues to affect individuals and communities.

Additionally, it is important to acknowledge and address any lingering resentment or mistrust between the two groups. This can be achieved through open communication, empathy, and a willingness to forgive and move forward.

Ultimately, building a positive relationship between Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans requires effort, patience, and a commitment to mutual respect and understanding. By working together towards a shared goal of peace and harmony, both groups can create a brighter future for themselves and their communities.

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Personal framework for running a global engineering team

Five months in being Director of Engineering for a fintech startup, overseeing a small team that spans south Asia and North America, I'm building a global engineering culture that produces a high-quality technology product. Greatest challenge I've ever faced. What is helping me?

1. Being a systems thinker.

As a child my uncle would go to a used computer store, Weird Stuff, in Silicon Valley and bring home junk. I would take apart and rebuild computers. At the same time, on weekends, I would help mom look after our garden filled with abundant fruit trees.

Looking after a garden helped me practice managing micro-ecologies. I played a lot of video games growing up, notably SimCity, Civilization, and SimEarth. It was fun to explore different ways of managing complex systems (cities, nations, planet).

2. Understanding culture via ethnic studies.

I became interested in understanding my Vietnamese heritage while entering college. I became involved in Vietnamese student organizing at the school, regional, and continental level, especially organizing conferences.

I took a course in Native American Studies and Asian American Studies to help compare. What was important was to have a statistical and anecdotal view of culture. Traits can manifest by many, or by few who still see themselves part of the group.

Also important was tweaking or implementing new cultural practices. A big focus during my time as a student organizer—credit which goes to my peers—was building social cohesion among people in different geographies via group activities, e.g. scavenger hunt, trò chơi lớn.

Sometimes it failed. Other times it succeeded. Either way, a lesson learned: utilize one's upbringing, or design a way to introduce people into a new practice. Which segues into...

3. Practice marketing and product development.

I practiced asking/answering: What do people do? Is there something (a product) that exists to fulfill their needs? How can it be improved? I practiced via student community organizing, and continued having joined many tech startups.

At every startup company, we created a tech product (I developed my software engineering skills), and had to test and validate its viability. And in the context of a startup, I learned product development processes such as Agile methodology.

Culture is a product too, e.g. instituting a mentorship program, or Vietnamese New Year festival. They're not software, but it benefits from asking the same questions. Can't just do things just cuz it's always been done that way. Why do it? Otherwise people flock to alternatives.

4. Study leadership.

One way to approach it is learning the levels of leadership. The first person you lead is yourself. And then you learn to lead peers/groups, then organizations, then communities, societies, etc.

For each level one had to learn different skills. Level 1 (self) you learn self-awareness and self-love. Level 2 (peers) you learn empathy, chit chat, paired activities (hanging out; dates). Level 3 (group) you learn things like conflict resolution mediation.

Learning and practice never ends. Just because I practiced how to do it with peers my age, as time goes on, you just end up practicing with people of different backgrounds: age, origin, beliefs, life circumstances, disabilities, etc.

5. Learning and applying industrialization.

So it's one thing to learn how to create products. It's another matter to make it accessible at scale. I'll watch videos on how things are built such as how Coca-Cola Company makes soda. Or how McDonald's churn out burgers quickly.

It helps to be a systems thinker, to really identify where things get slow. When I played SimCity, I loved identifying and clearing out traffic bottlenecks. It also helps to understand lifecycles (thanks high school biology), because a lot of problems come down to timing issues.

Now... I don't have a formal training in industrial processes like Six Sigma or Toyota Production System. But it's definitely something I'm interested in. Why? Because I like to model after good practices that already exist. Which segues into...

6. Leverage partnerships and external inspirations.

An important lesson I learned while organizing in the Vietnamese nonprofit community is: if you can't do it yourself, partner with someone who can. Build their work into your flow. Or model their process.

I worked with nonprofits, so I only had shoestring budgets or volunteer hours to work with. My mentees created youth development programs by inviting staff of other nonprofits to participate. DIY is cool, but if it's not an option, collaborate.

Or if limited resources, introduce an abbreviated form. Set a goal for each team member to learn and apply one new thing each month to steer the team towards a framework. Sometimes it's about introducing terminology, because words shape our reality and the way we do things.

Sorry this is so long; really this is a brain dump. I need it because I needed to create my own personal framework for how I am running the engineering team.

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Multigenerational journey of a thousand miles

I went on a date today with my pregnant wife, nearing the end of her second trimester.

We started the morning watching an episode of Kitchen Nightmares in which master chef Gordon Ramsay was critiquing the practices of an Italian restaurant owner who was stuck in his ways after he took over the restaurant after his parents died, driving the business to near ruin. A great transformation took place, especially where the owner learned to let go of ritual habits ("this is how we've always done it when my parents were alive"), but still honor the memories of his family when Gordon had the restaurant redecorated and having a wall of the restaurant be filled with old photos of the owner's parents when they ran the business.

We went to SeaQuest Folsom to enjoy some of the animal and marine life (it's more for families with kids than to impress grown adults). We passed by this wine & painting studio that was selling paintings and she asked if I wanted to buy some to decorate the home. I declined, stating I wanted to decorate our home—which we purchased and moved into almost exactly one year ago—with photos of our family.

We stopped by the nearby Barnes & Noble bookstore, and I came across this book "Japanese Americans of the South Bay", and flipped through its pages, taking note that they featured a lot of old photos and captions that told a story of what was going on. I told my wife "You know, my mom has a lot of photos from the past. I really want a copy of them." I touched my hand on her womb. I really wanted our baby Timothy ("Tim" in Vietnamese means "heart") to know where he came from, about the journey my mother's family, my father's family, and my wife's family took to arrive here and thrive in America.

After eating delicious food at The River Thai Cuisine, we came home, took a nap. I remember this text message from my friends Christine Pham and Quyen Mai when they asked me about how we might commemorate April 30, 1975, the day South Vietnam ceased to exist and become part of a reunified Vietnam. In 2025, it will be 50 years since that moment, a pretty significant milestone. I think there is a lot to reflect about how the Vietnamese people, both within Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, have evolved after the end of the war. For my generation who were born after the war, we simply cannot observe it the way the previous generation did who viewed it as a loss of home through forced migration. But for me, and thinking about baby Timothy, I thought it more appropriate to find photos from the past that told a compelling story about our family's journey from Vietnam, that we are like dandelion seeds scattering in the winds, making homes wherever we land.

Maybe something like 50 photos for the 50 years. Just like the Italian restaurant owner we watched about this morning. Just like the book of Japanese Americans in the South Bay. Something to adorn the walls of our new home in Florin of the Sacramento region. A multigenerational story of loss, reunion, love, reconciliation, and hope.

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bánh mì, grand-père & the multiverse

Bánh mì is a Vietnamese term for wheat bread, as well as the sandwich derived from them. As a sandwich, in its most popular form, it uses a loaf of baguette, chicken liver pâté spread, deli meats (especially chả lụa ham, char siu BBQ pork, and/or grilled pork), topped with julienned pickled daikon and carrot, a sprig of cilantro for aromatics, and a few slices of fresh jalapeño peppers.

There is a similar food, bò né, which is essentially Vietnamese steak & eggs, often served with pâté, sometimes grilled onions, and with a side of baguette. I jokingly call it deconstructed bánh mì, a sandwich that you eat off the plate. The day before my grandfather's funeral, I took my father out to eat some "deconstructed bánh mì".

"Did grandpa ever had to go to reeducation camp like you did Dad?"

I wasn't very close to my grandfather. I met him enough times to count on two hands, perhaps. And even during those times, it was difficult to communicate with him because of my limited Vietnamese language proficiency. Or maybe I was just very shy and didn't know what to say to him. It turns out he was more fluent in English than I gave him credit for. It was not until I was already in college that I first learned he was a poet, about anything interesting about him.

Dad said no; ông nội had already left the Republic of Vietnam's War Psychology Department, having served in the early 1960s for three years, about a decade before the end of the war between North and South Vietnam. He served as a battlefield journalist (aka war correspondent), reporting events from the front lines. I was curious whether grandpa—having served for an institution connected to the South Vietnam government that opposed the victorious communist political class—would have been incarcerated into reeducation camps following the end of the war. They were prisons with the purpose of de-radicalizing any possible insurgent elements loyal to the former South Vietnam. My father spent 3 years in one as a low rank-and-file soldier; and that was considered short and for good behavior. I asked that question wondering if grandpa had to endure that kind of hardship, on top of the fact that postwar Vietnam had to face difficulty in reconstruction while getting embargoed by America and by China due to Cold War politics. And although grandpa wasn't detained into one, I can only imagine what he felt knowing he had friends and relatives (my dad among them) who disappeared from his life for years.

Bò né as deconstructed bánh mì is a somewhat silly (and delicious) way of describing how I have this tendency to take things apart, appreciate the pieces, and then recombining them again. And so over the few years that I had a chance to try to understand grandpa, I placed his life in front of me, deconstructed it, and examined the moments of his life. There are many details to everyone's life, his included. But what I think stood out to me, as soon as I examined his life, was this inexplicable parallels to my own life.

Born Ngô Đa Thiện in 1923 in Quảng Trị, Việt-Nam, then part of the Indochinese Union as a French colony, he was the son of a Chinese immigrant from the nearby island of Hainan who married into a local Vietnamese family. Dad told me how grandpa was kind of the black sheep among his siblings. He grew up taking an interest in literature, especially foreign literature, while his siblings made their living through trade and business. In his youth he would participate in poetry recitals. By 1943, during the time of Imperial Japanese occupation, he would earn his Diplôme d'Étude Primaire Supérieurs Franco-Indigène as proof of his French fluency, and continued to learn English himself. Shortly thereafter, he would move to Saigon, work for a French commercial company as an accountant, marry my paternal grandmother, and have their first child in the late 1940s. My father would become their third child in 1949, whereupon my grandfather would move back to Quảng Trị to open up a portrait photography studio and operate it for ten years while becoming a father to more children (my aunts and uncles). By the end of his life, he would have 13 children; 11 with his wife, and adopting another 2. In 1960, he moved back to Saigon and served for three years as a war correspondent. In 1966, he would go work for an American financial company for three years. When my father sponsored the entire family over to the United States through the Orderly Departure Program, my grandfather would continue to hone his translation skills by taking courses in Japanese at a local community college, as well as helping translate news articles and poems among Vietnamese, English, French, and Chinese.

If I could speak to grandpa, I would tell him—despite not having grown up around him all that much—I grew up reading the English dictionary, and in my middle school years, started composing poetry. I learned French and Spanish in high school. Parlez-vous français pépère? I entered university UCLA and, rather than focusing on my computer science major—selected as the sensible thing to choose given many of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side had a career in the technology industry—I instead developed my photography and graphic design sensibilities. I dropped out of UCLA's computer science program, trying to pursue and survive on a graphic design career. Thinking that I had to try to get back into a "real career", I tried to pursue accounting. I could not get past the second quarter in it. And yet within the past 3 years, I would join my best friend Duy to help him create a financial technology company. And now I am married to my beloved Thuy. (As she was reading this paragraph noting the parallels between my and my grandfather's lives, she insisted on not having 13 children.)

Even my father has a creative streak: a singer-songwriter, musician, and three degrees in Buddhist philosophy, Vietnamese literature, and radio telecommunications.

And so there is a part of me that is in awe and wonder of the parallels of creative men of three generations. It is a mysterious coincidence, that perhaps there is some kind of underlying order in the universe that gives rise to this kind of repetition. My dad would say it is karma or that it runs in the blood. I don't know about karma. However I concede that there are still things about the universe human beings only have the faintest glimpses of understanding. Maybe our souls are mathematically divine states of quantum wave functions, vibrating like music along cosmic strings.

But the idea of human behavior running in the blood, or rather our DNA, has some merit. Consider that when kittens are born and begin to grow up, they instinctively know to use a litter box. There is plenty we do not know about human epigenetics, little "programs" within our DNA that facilitate certain behaviors. And then I had a rather interesting thought about my relationship to my grandfather and to my extended family on my father's side of 12 aunts/uncles and ~30 first cousins. Me and every single one of my first cousins have about 25% of each of our DNA shared with our grandfather. Each of us is literally 25% Ngô Đa Thiện. I felt like each us are an alternate reality of his DNA. I, Ngô Thiên Bảo, am the manifestation of his genetics living as a male Vietnamese American doing software engineering. My cousin Catherine Ngo is the manifestation of his genetics living as a female Vietnamese American learning animation. Christie Ngo is the expression of his genetics living as a female Vietnamese American studying statistics/informatics. And Richard Ngo is the manifestation of his DNA as a Vietnamese American aspiring to be a computer scientist.

There are times when I dream of alternate realities and alter egos, like a role-playing video game where you assume the life of another person. And yet, my family are the very physical, real, manifestations of my own genes played out in different lives in different ways. And when you deconstruct their lives, and then "replay" their lives to understand where each one is coming from, you not only build empathy, but start to become aware of your own possibilities. Family is the manifestation of your own personal multiverse. (I am aware of the multiverse connection to the recently debuted film Everything Everywhere All at Once.) Like it or not, they are what you are if you were born as another person. If that is not reason enough to state why family is important, then I don't know what is.

And so after understanding glimpses of grandpa's life, what is my possibility? What I see from his life, is a life filled with love and compassion (I mean... with 13 children and his wife, my grandmother, that is impossible to refute). I see a life filled with awe and wonder of the deep mysteries and patterns of the universe. I see a life of creativity, and the courage to take the road less traveled (one of the poems he translated in his book was "The road not taken" by Robert Frost). And it fills me with warmth and hope that that legacy that my grandfather has bestowed upon our family will carry on into my as-yet-born child who will draw breath this autumn.

Rest in peace grandpa. You're not only with me in spirit. You are me.

Ngô Đa Thiện (1923 Quảng Trị, Việt-Nam–2022 San Jose, California)

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We got married 9/9/2021, but kept it a simple affair without an extravagant ceremony. So here's my artistic interpretation of our union. Hello Kitty's dress inspired by wedding fashion designer Phuong Minh Nguyen https://www.instagram.com/dreamdressesbypmn/

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I woke up from a dream where I was walking through a landscape filled with the ink and color from the dozens of artists I've featured (and have yet to feature) on the Visual Artists of Vietnamese Ancestry (VAVA) group. I was listening Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir singing "Sing Gently" who wove together 17,572 voices. I felt like Waldo in one of Martin Handford's illustrations.

And it reminded me of a similar style of work by Lys Bui.

Although this work was commissioned, one by one my mind replaced each character to ones drawn by each of the artists I've featured in my VAVA group.

I remember Vietnamese American pixel artist Pluuey, with an original character Enola: an artist who fell in love with Orion and had two children together, strolling through the marketplace.

I remember Brian Duy Hoang's "Lunch With Friends" enjoying noodles at a street stall.

And I remember Jenny Lelong (French of Chinese-Vietnamese descent) "Traveling by train".

It is like the opening scene of the movie BELLE, from Mamoru Hosoda and Studio Chizu, set in a virtual reality world where all users represent themselves with their own digital avatars.

My dream flashes to a conversation I once had with an older, successful Vietnamese American businesswoman I met over coffee, and she asked me: "Why do you care so much about the Vietnamese community?" referring to my involvement in my younger years as a youth organizer within the United Vietnamese Student Associations of Northern California and Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations. I struggled to find the answer then. Maybe my personal essay, an answer to the Quora question "Do Vietnamese Americans ever feel that they belong to Vietnam?" shed some light: A desire to express the love I want to envelope on the relations among Vietnamese in light of the wars during the 20th century.

When I look at Lys Bui's illustration, the people are illustrated with a pretty simple color palette. And the way I interpret it is that, I may not have been born in Vietnam. But my DNA patterns have—built from a simple palette of 4 nucleotides bases—and through my ancestors, my DNA has witnessed the same red sunset and felt the warm monsoon rains as every other person with Vietnamese ancestry. I'd like to think that our genetics is like a musical refrain, an expression of our place in this world, and someday I'd love to see an artwork that visually expresses a choir song of the Vietnamese people, who are according to mythology, descended from the Dragon Lord Lạc Long Quân and the Faerie Princess Âu Cơ.

Leon Vương, founder of Saigon Augusta, "Fairy Mother Âu Cơ".

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I started a Facebook group Visual Artists of Vietnamese Ancestry to share my interest in Diasporic Vietnamese art.

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If I had a chance to ever go back to school and graduate with a degree in art and computer science, I would create artificial intelligence tech that can generate unique patterns of koi fish, then license the tech to animation studios that want to render ponds of koi fish in a scene or something. I would also write a story/play like Ponyo about a koi fish that wanted to become human because she didn't feel like she connected with any of the other pond residents except for her human friend.

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Bảo, how did you come to start the Vietnamese American Visual Artists group?

Wow! Where do I begin? You know what, I'll just talk about the most recent story. If people want to know the story going further back, that can be for another day.

One day I have a curiosity about other people named Bảo but who are in the creative fields. After searching, I came across Bao Vo of Los Angeles who was a musician and creative brander. I reached out to him and told him how cool his work was. So one day he told me he was coming up to the San Francisco Bay Area for work, and invited to hang out. We went to a restaurant with some of his friends and I brought my friend Anthomas Tran who is also a musician and who was a fan of Bao’s work. It probably made Bao’s day to meet someone who really admired his work.

It made me curious about the other creative Bảo’s out there, and doing another search, I found Bao Pham’s illustration work (he lives in Iowa). And oh my goodness, I totally fell in love.

And then I found another bao ngo, a photographer in NYC, and I was mesmerized by her/their (bao is non-binary I later learned) photographic work; it was just so rich in color.

And then another Google search for a Vietnamese family name “Tran” and “American artist” yielded Tran Nguyen, an illustrator in Georgia. And I fell in love with the work! The hair reminded me of the terraced rice fields of Sa Pa, Vietnam, which I’ve only ever seen pictures of, and have yet to visit.

It was at that moment I decided I needed to share this with other artists I knew. My beloved girlfriend Thuy showed me a Facebook group called “Cộng đồng Designer Việt Nam” (Vietnamese Designer Community), and I thought it made sense to create a kind of chapter of the visual creative community for the United States. And thus Vietnamese American Visual Artists was born.

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Vietnamese American Visual Artists

Created a Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/VietnameseAmericanVisualArtists/ to make it easier for Vietnamese American visual artists to share and inspire creativity.

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Translating “Vietnamese Diaspora” as “người Việt Nam lưu tán”

Professor Thien-Huong Ninh and I had a talk about the translation of the term “Vietnamese Diaspora”. I had to bring up a bunch of dictionaries.

First, breaking down diaspora into its Greek roots, with dia “across” + speirein “scatter”.

In Chinese, diaspora translates as 流散, with 流 “flow”, “drift”, “scatter”. And 散 “free”, “unfettered”, “scattered”, “apart”.

Translating 流散 to Vietnamese would be lưu tán. So from there, I Google-searched its usage and found:

con dân Việt lưu tán, though I’d be careful with using Việt 越 by itself because it’s also used to refer to the Bǎiyuè 百越 (Vietnamese: Bách Việt), which was an umbrella term for all the historical indigenous tribes of Southern China and Northern Vietnam.

dân Việt Nam lưu tán or người Việt Nam lưu tán, for example in an article about Mạc Cửu.

Although, what’s interesting is that an alternate reading of Yuè/Việt 越 itself also means “scatter”. When I see the term Việt kiều 越僑 “overseas Vietnamese”, (kiều 僑 “overseas”, “residing abroad”) it’s almost like a double-entendre, with Việt to mean both “scatter” and being a shorthand for “people of modern-day Vietnam”. In that sense, the concept of người Việt Nam lưu tán “Vietnamese diaspora” (chữ Nôm: 𠊛越南流散) sounds almost like people that got scattered twice, the first time to the south (of China), and the second time freely in all directions. Or if you shorten it to người Việt lưu tán 𠊛越流散, it sounds like “scattered people who scatter and scatter”. It seems to connote an idea of a people whose destiny is to continue to scatter. Perhaps in the distant future, it will be among the stars.

Image caption: Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Cuong offers a hopeful anecdote from Sun Tzu:

The men of Wu and Yueh hated each other, however, encountering severe winds when crossing a river on the same boat, they assisted each other like left and right hands.

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Ancestry.com better Vietnamese support

Hello Ancestry product managers,

I am a second generation Vietnamese American, beginning to compile my genealogy.

As you may or may not already know, Vietnamese Americans are among the newest ethnic populations arriving to America as a consequence of the Vietnam War. While America ended its involvement in 1973, do remember that the war involved a North Vietnam and South Vietnam. In 1975, South Vietnam was defeated, and all government and military personnel, along with their families, were politically persecuted. Facing political imprisonment, a famine, and economic discrimination, about 600,000 Vietnamese escaped by boat or orderly departures and settled in America by the mid-1990s. Today, through family sponsorships, immigration, and a new generation being born, Vietnamese Americans now number 2.1 million, or about 0.65% of the total U.S. population.

As Vietnam had to contend with (1) being a developing country (2) having gone through war for its independence and a civil war and (3) political discrimination of the former South Vietnam population, these reasons present a tremendous challenge to record keeping. As such, there is a huge potential and desire to properly document and recover our personal histories. In fact, ancestor veneration is a cornerstone of Vietnamese culture; family altars filled with portraits of our ancestors are commonplace among Vietnamese families.

Also, Vietnamese language and culture present unique user experience challenges, which I shall outline below. And we’ll use my grandfather’s name for the sake of example and explanation.

The Vietnamese language is written based on an adaptation of the Latin / Portuguese alphabet. It should be by far the easiest to extend support for from a UI standpoint. The only consideration you will need to make is whether fonts support the Vietnamese range of characters in the Unicode plane (generally the Extended Latin blocks). I notice the site’s use of Source Sans Pro, which should already support the Vietnamese character range. But for some reason, the web font is missing the Vietnamese characters. The letter “ạ” (U+1EA1), for example, is missing. Either your version of Source Sans Pro is outdated, or it stripped the Vietnamese character range from some kind of font optimizer.

Next, in Vietnamese culture, names are displayed in reverse order compared to Western tradition. So instead of first-name, middle-name, and surname, Vietnamese display the name in surname, middle-name, first-name fashion. For example, my grandfather’s last name is “Phạm”, his middle name is “Hửu”, and his first name is “Điềm”. It would be displayed as Phạm Hửu Điềm on official Vietnamese records and when used in Vietnamese speech.

When he arrived to the United States, because American English do not use diacritics, and because we use a first-middle-surname order, his name became Diem Huu Pham, though he would legally change this to David Huu Pham to make it easier for Americans to refer to him. As I was born in the United States, my name is Bao Thien Ngo.

So this presents an interesting challenge with regards to bilingual family trees where pre-migration, the names are surname-middle-first order with diacritics, and post-migration, as well as all subsequent generations born in America, they would use a non-diacritic first-middle-surname order. I would request a feature to record name display order, or a preferred display name. I want to see my grandfather’s name as it was recorded on Vietnamese birth certificates (Phạm Hửu Điềm), but my name as per American birth certificates (Bao Thien Ngo).

I believe I can use “also known as” descriptions to record name changes from Vietnamese order with diacritics to American order without diacritics.

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Vietnamese American culture: Black April

April 30, 1975 is the day that South Vietnam dissolved, bringing to a close a war that lasted nearly twenty years. In Vietnam, they call this Reunification Day. And while all Vietnamese had desired an undivided Vietnam, this unity was paid for in blood and tears. While the reunified Vietnam engaged in yet another war with Cambodia and later China, martial law forced thousands of former South Vietnam government and military personnel into reeducation camps, to ascertain their suitability for reentry into the new Vietnamese society under communism, while their families would experience economic hardship when Vietnam would become embargoed by America and China. Thousands were compelled to flee Vietnam, leaving behind everything they’ve ever owned, especially on overcrowded boats with limited food and water, trying to avoid coastal patrols and pirates. And if they had managed to survive the dangerous seas, they’d arrive at countries that did not readily want them, being escorted to refugee camps and awaiting hope for countries willing to adopt them. And as they arrive to their new “home”, they are met with both open arms from kind people, as much as slurs and dirty looks from equally as many others. They must find a way to rebuild their lives in a language and culture so foreign to them. And their families back in Vietnam do what they can to eke out a living, their familial bonds torn not once, but twice: first by those who died during the war, and second by the thousands of miles of ocean and gated borders that divided their countries.

And then, my generation was born.

And I had been oblivious to my family endured until I entered college, when I began learning about what happened decades ago. Even though I never grew up during the war, I had felt a secondhand trauma of that war. I think back now having grown up and remembering my Vietnamese peers, the ones who had absent parents—whether because of death, separation by the ocean, or working multiple jobs to put food on the table—who would become involved with gangs. Who abandoned their Vietnamese identity to find a sense of home among non-Vietnamese families. Who helped their family with side jobs while trying to succeed in school, steeling themselves against bullies who neither understood their origins nor appreciate their differences, hesitating to befriend those who can easily spend money at malls while we rummage thrift stores and flea markets. And as my father adopted the rest of his family from Vietnam to America, it was certainly a joyful kind of Reunification, but one in which I felt a different kind of ocean dividing us: an erosion of my mother tongue. It was a gated border between our hearts. How could I know how my grandparents lived? How my parents lived? How my newly arrived cousins lived?

It is now 2020, forty-five years since the day my family lost a fragment of the heart, their home. A friend asked me, what we ought to do to observe April 30, what many of us have come to call Black April, the Fall of Saigon.

Truth be told, I have heard from family, that they stopped going to Black April commemorations long ago, because it was repetitive. Perhaps it was reopening old wounds. I had attended some commemorations in the past, but it was hard to follow because of my 7-year-old proficiency in Vietnamese. But even if that weren’t the case, perhaps deep down inside, it was difficult to empathize. While I learned about other people’s stories, I wasn’t making progress on my own life, my own relationship with my family. I didn’t know my own past.

And so, what has transpired in the last few years in my life has been marked by healing. I restored my estranged relationship with my father. I interviewed him onto video, talking about his life growing up, to how he arrived here. This year, we’re planning a trip to Hawaii to visit his uncle’s family (all of my second cousins), whom I’ve never met before. I took a genetic test (23andMe to be precise), and it revealed to me my ethnic ancestry. Turns out I’m 25% Chinese, so that’s interesting. My father showed me the family altar at my grandparents’ home, about my Chinese great grandfather. I started hanging out with my cousins on my father side a little more. My cousin Nina made a family tree. It was too many people to track already by the third generation. The fourth generation is going to be ridiculous.

So I think from my experiences, if I had to model what a personally meaningful Black Commemoration would look like for me, taking ideas from family altars, death anniversaries (ngày giỗ), a family journey report I did in second grade, and moving to a digital age:

Building some portion of my family tree. Names, years they lived, and something interesting or memorable about each person. Like, my paternal grandfather owned a photography shop back in Vietnam, became a war photographer, and writes trilingual poetry (Vietnamese, English, French). I’m using Ancestry.com to facilitate sharing and collaboration.

Using a map to trace the journey of my parents. Where was my mother and father born. Where did they grow up? And what was their journey to and through America like? I will annotate the locations in Ancestry.com, but I’m going to want to use something like Google Maps with connected waypoints. This will require some research, but I’ll create a how-to video when I find a satisfactory way to tell my family’s journey.

Sharing with someone about the two ideas above. Being able to share, and learn about our family’s journey to America, and knowing the kind of people they were, not just by their names, but through stories that describe them as real human beings.

Personalize the candles. Since it’s a commemoration, if there are candles, I would like to at least write my grandfather’s name, who passed away last year, as someone who fled his home of Vietnam. I would also write what he stood for: family, wisdom, humility, perseverance.

Define who we are. Just as I pay homage to the people who came before me and what they stood for, I want the candles to light the torch to our future. Us. What do we stand for? I am creativity, inspiration, and trust. I want my peers to know as much as I do, that the sacrifices of our ancestors gave birth to this:

[baohouse]

Idea: Vietnamese American Mom & Pop Musical

I once had a dream years ago, about some kind of musical set in a small business plaza somewhere in Little Saigon, and the business plaza had a convenience store, a laundromat, a martial arts studio, a take-out restaurant, a hair & nail salon, a video rental store, a coffee shop, and a tailor shop.

I think I had this dream because I never knew what it was like to grow up in Saigon, Vietnam. I only knew this plaza that I frequented as a kid that was down the street from my house in San Jose, filled with mom and pop shops. The shops have changed over time, such as the video rental store no longer existing, which I remember being owned by a Chinese Vietnamese American family.

I think maybe the story would’ve focused on these high school students who wanted to go to prom, and were too shy to ask anyone, even as they discovered they both lived in the same neighborhood and started to get to know each other through their random encounters at this plaza.